Strawberry - 1899

Early Summer, 1899

Suzanne packed saddlebags for each of the boys, making sure they had clean socks and underwear and a clean shirt each. In the morning, she would put together food for them and for Heath, enough so that they could camp out once on the way, once in Strawberry and once on the way back. It was to be their first trip to Strawberry. It was to be special.

Heath came to bed after cleaning up, seeing his wife closing up the saddlebags. "They're so excited they probably won't sleep," he said.

Suzanne smiled. "How about their father?"

"Well," Heath said, wrapping his arms around his wife's waist, "kinda more cautious, I guess."

"Cautious?"

"Not sure how I'll explain everything."

"Well, they both know you were born and raised in Strawberry already."

"Yeah, but I'm not sure seeing it now is going to sit too well with them. Papa's from a ghost town? I'm not sure they'll really believe it wasn't like that when I was growing up, and I wonder if they'll really understand I'm from someplace different than their Uncle Nick."

"Oh, give them some credit," Suzanne said, turning in his arms and kissing him on the mouth. "They might understand things better when they see where you actually grew up. I know I did."

"You were an old married lady."

"Old?" Suzanne protested.

Heath laughed. "Only to them."

"You are looking forward to going, aren't you?"

Heath smiled. "Yeah, to seeing them see it. I'm not sure how I'll feel when I see the old place gone mostly to dust."

Suzanne kissed him again. "Having the boys with you will help you adjust to that, I'll bet. This will be a good trip for all of you – even the camping part."

"I don't know about that. Beans, and all."

Suzanne laughed and put the saddlebags on the chair.

Before she could turn around again, Heath had her by the waist and pulled her back to the bed. She laughed, trying not to be too loud about it. The boys didn't need to hear everything.

XXXXXXX

The next day, Heath got himself together fairly slowly, even though Little Heath and Nicky were chomping at the bit to get going. "We're camping out tonight," Heath explained. "We don't have that far to go. We're going to camp out at a place not too far from Strawberry where I liked to go hunting, and we're gonna do our best to get some rabbit or quail for our supper."

Suzanne said quietly, "I've packed you some ham and potatoes."

"The boys love the beans. You can guess why."

Suzanne chuckled. "That's your problem, darling. I'll pack some."

They took off just after having a sandwich or two for an early lunch, and the rode almost all the way to Strawberry. The boys had never been this way before, so Heath took care to point out a lot of things to them – the stream where he liked to catch trout when he was a kid, the place where he liked to look for Indian arrowheads and even found one or two. He wasn't sure his sons were all that interested in his escapades as a boy, at least not yet, so he picked out a good camping spot about five miles from Strawberry and let Nicky build a fire while he let Little Heath go off on his own to shoot what small game he might find.

Heath made sure Nicky was building a fire correctly, watching over his shoulder while he unsaddled the horses and brushed them down. Heath led them all to a spring nearby and let them drink, then tethered them on the other side of their camp where there was some decent grass for them to graze on. By the time he finished all that, Nicky had a good fire going.

Heath and Nicky heard two shots from not very far away. "I hope Heath has shot us some dinner," Nicky said. "I like beans, but some rabbit would really taste good."

It wasn't very long before Little Heath appeared with said rabbit. Heath watched with pride as his son skinned his catch, and then Nicky helped get the rabbit cooking over the fire. Nicky had already made coffee, and the three Barkley men settled by the fire drinking the strong brew as the sun began to set.

"Papa," Nicky said at one point, "you keep calling Strawberry a ghost town. So why exactly are we going there?"

"There are things I want you to see," Heath said. "My mama – your grandmother – is buried there. I want you to see her grave. And my Aunt Rachel is buried there too, and Hannah, the woman who helped my mama and Aunt Rachel raise me. I want to tell you more about them when we get there. And I want to show you the house we managed to buy when I was little."

"Is that where you were born, Papa?" Little Heath asked.

"No," Heath said quietly. "When I was born, there weren't a lot of houses in Strawberry. Mostly people lived in tents, and I was born in a tent. It's long gone now."

"Why did people come to live in Strawberry if it didn't have any houses?" Nicky asked.

Heath smiled. "Gold. Somebody found gold there, and men came from everywhere. Women came to find husbands, and it happened so fast there wasn't time to build houses at first. But then the town built up pretty nice."

"But now it's a ghost town," Little Heath said. "Why?"

"The mine played out," Heath said. "The people who came there dug up all the gold, and when there wasn't any left, there wasn't any reason for anybody to stay."

"You didn't stay either."

"No, I left even before it completely played out. I went to the war, and when I came back, people were already starting to leave."

"But your mama and Aunt Rachel and Hannah stayed."

"Yeah, they stayed. They didn't have anyplace else to go. They all stayed until they died." Heath felt a pang of guilt that he always felt when he thought about those women, and how he left them after they nursed him back to health after the war. Sure, his mother said over and over that he needed to leave Strawberry and find a better life, but he still felt guilty. He had wanted to find that better life and bring her to it, but he didn't find it until after she was gone.

Heath kept all that to himself. His boys didn't need to know any of that.

Nicky broke the silence again. "Do they call it a ghost town because it has ghosts?"

"There's no such thing as ghosts," Little Heath said quickly.

"No, it doesn't have ghosts," Heath said. "Heath is right – there's no such things as ghosts. I guess they call it a ghost town just because no people live there anymore. It can get a little scary, especially at night. But we'll all stick together. There won't be any ghosts around to bother us."

"I saw a ghost once," Nicky said.

"You did not," Little Heath said.

"I did!" Nicky said.

Heath smiled. "Where did you see a ghost?"

"At home, near the barn," Nicky said. "It was a big man and his eyes were lit up."

Little Heath said, "You saw an owl in a tree."

Heath said, "Well, I don't think you saw a ghost. I think maybe you just saw a shadow a certain way and thought it was a ghost."

"Well, I thought it was a ghost, but it wasn't scary," Nicky said. "He just blinked and then he was gone."

Heath said, "There aren't any ghosts, Nicky, so don't you go worrying about them. Besides, we won't spend the night in Strawberry if either of you don't want to. It's pretty dark at night anyway. No lights."

"I'm not afraid to spend the night in a ghost town," Little Heath said, "because there's no such thing as ghosts."

"Me neither, but there are such things as ghosts," Nicky said.

"No, there aren't," Heath said.

The rabbit and the beans were ready by then, so they all began to eat and forgot about ghosts.